For thousands of years, different groups of people have lived in the Negev desert, building stone walls and cities that survive to this day. But how did they make their living?

The current thinking is that these desert denizens didn't practice agriculture before approximately the first century, surviving instead by raising animals, said Hendrik Bruins, a landscape archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

But new research suggests people in this area, the Negev highlands, practiced agriculture as long ago as 5000 B.C., Bruins told LiveScience. If true, the finding could change historians' views of the area's inhabitants, who lived in the region in biblical times and even before, he added.

A great surprise

Bruins' findings come from radiocarbon dating of bones and organic materials in various soil layers in an ancient field in southern Israel. He measured the ratio of carbon isotopes (atoms of the same element with a different number of neutrons), which changes as the radioactive carbon-14 isotope breaks down over time, while the stable carbon-12 does not. Within the soil, he found evidence of past cultivation, including animal manure and charred organic material (likely burnt kitchen scraps), both of which have been used as fertilizer around the world for millennia, he said.

By using walls to channelize and collect floodwaters, ancient farmers made the most of scant rainfall to grow crops in the desert. These techniques are still used today, like in this vineyard near Sede Boqer, Israel.

well, there kinda is a ‘Moses was here’ already isn’t there? Caleb’s puported tomb is in Timnath-serah (west bank) and it was this same Caleb, from Numbers 13:23, who went out as a spy for Moses, camped south of Israel, and found grapevines, with grapes so large it took two men to carry one bunch stretched between two staffs.

Grapes do grow wild, but to get a cluster so fruity that two men were needed to carry it? It’s hard to imagine something like that to not have been a result of careful cultivation by the ‘giants’ that Caleb and the other 11 spys saw.

not the same area as the article is talking about but Cain was also a farmer, Noah was a vitner, so horticultural skills were known from the beginning of the Bible.

But new research suggests people in this area, the Negev highlands, practiced agriculture as long ago as 5000 B.C., Bruins told LiveScience. If true, the finding could change historians' views of the area's inhabitants, who lived in the region in biblical times and even before, he added.

Does not surprise me. Here is what troubles me. Modern man punctuated into existence 70,000 to 240,000 ears ago depending upon whom you believe. 5000 years ago Man was still a stone age technologist. In that short amount of time he landed on the Moon. Yet, it took him 35 to 120 times longer to go from making spearheads to stone buildings without adding anything new to his anatomy.

This would only make sense if world human population remained too low for society to support clever inventive types. I think there is a lot of interesting stuff buried deeper than archeologists tend to dig that will eventually crop up and push advanced technology further back in time.

That scenario doesn’t seem too likely, even if the lower figure of 70K (or as some would have it 40K) is accepted.

The problem is perhaps analogous to the search for exoplanets — when the first one was verified back in the 1990s, the technology was such that only very large bodies could be detected. Now nearly twenty years on bodies only 2 or 3 times Earth’s size can be detected.

With perishable materials, much less will survive over these huge intervals; woven material was used a very long time ago, but has only survived in the form of the imprints left on, say, clay. But the stone tools, arrowheads, etc, will be there for millions of years.

The oldest multirow (cultivated) barley sample AFAIK goes back to RC 14000 years ago, dug up in the Near East somewhere. It’s amazing that it survived, but it pushes back the verified age of agriculture. Postholes from structures rather like longhouses have been dated to 800K, and while it’s possible that a hunter-gatherer culture may have built shelters, the very nature of a moving food supply makes it unlikely that some form of agriculture was NOT being practiced there.

For much of the last 2 million years the oceans have been reduced in depth by glaciers on the highlands of the continents, and it’s perfectly likely that most of what we’d consider human prehistory left its traces on what is now the continental shelf.

Wine was also used to clean up the water, and the water diluted the wine to avoid dehydration during the hot weather. :’) The Greeks did the same thing, in Homer there’s at least one scene where Odysseus is sitting at a table, mingling wine with water.

IIRC, it was considered gauche among the Romans not to dilute their wine with water.

It's easy to forget that for most of human history urban water sources were dangerous. It was common to use alcohol or acid to mix with water to make it safer. Hence, the great popularity of tea and coffee. Also, it was common for people to drink beer over plain water until even into the 20th Century in the US and Northern Europe. Ahhh, for the old ways.

The oldest multirow (cultivated) barley sample AFAIK goes back to RC 14000 years ago, dug up in the Near East somewhere. Its amazing that it survived, but it pushes back the verified age of agriculture. Postholes from structures rather like longhouses have been dated to 800K, and while its possible that a hunter-gatherer culture may have built shelters, the very nature of a moving food supply makes it unlikely that some form of agriculture was NOT being practiced there.

Afrocentrists have this "thing" about the early Egyptians being black Africans. Personally, I think that agriculturalists from much further north came down the eastern Mediterranean coast, found the very fertile Nile valley, and displaced any Africans who might have earlier been there. Egyptian civilization followed.

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posted on 04/08/2014 11:34:47 AM PDT
by PapaBear3625
(You don't notice it's a police state until the police come for you.)

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